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Thursday, 1 November 2018

Seeking Delusions

When Toby’s voices
suddenly stopped - the voices that only he could hear - he was miserable. He now
no longer had friends in his head, always engaging him in a friendly badinage, and
generally making him - honest and plain (except for a predilection for
hallucinogens) - Toby Maddox, the centre of their attentions. It was simply
divine always hearing one well-spoken of, even by imagined voices.

Toby had been hearing these voices from
the age of twenty-two, three years ago, and had quickly been diagnosed as being
schizophrenic, having a few other of the other symptoms as well, and a family
history of it, which he only learned of on his twenty-first birthday. He was prescribed
an antipsychotic, Fluanxol, 20mg, injected into a muscle, but the medication only
turned the volume down on the voices, never banishing them. Toby, of course,
knew he wasn’t crazy, that the voices were real, and only took the so called
medication because it would obviously have no effect upon him. He wasn’t crazy.
He had also been told that if he didn’t take the injection he would be forced
to do so in a psychiatric facility, and was monitored accordingly by being
placed on a Community Treatment Order, where if he did not take his dose he
would be involuntarily committed to said psychiatric facility in order to do so.

He realised he had not awoken to the
voices, on a nice, hot, early summer day, 2015, a few years after his
diagnosis, in Surrey Hills, inner city Sydney. Their departure was sudden and
unexpected. The bastard medication must obviously have been at fault. When he
realised what was off-kilter he instinctively and desperately hoped he could
get the voices back, whilst also feeling that no-one could ever be that
fortunate. It would take something extraordinary, as well as ordinary, to get
them back. Maybe a unique, perfect thought would serve the purpose, providing
something to which the voices would readily respond? But that just raised more
questions; what’s the perfect thought? Does it have to be completely perfect to
attract back the voices?

He, however, already knew the answer, or
at least was fairly sure he knew how to get back with the voices. Just take LSD
for a few weeks. It was the quickest, and perhaps the surest, way to invite the
voices back, but he was loath to use the method. True, he’d had a lot of acid
over the past three or so years and was always fine with it, but he was
presently on an indefinite break for a while. He had become more aware recently
that it only takes one bad trip to fell you, leaving you a wreck of what you
could have been. So while Toby felt fairly confident that he could take the
acid safely, based on previous occasions, he wasn’t completely certain that
he’d always be okay on it. But, yet again, it really was the surest way to
allure back the voices.

He considered how to get some trips,
finishing his coffee.

*

Toby had been on his acid
regime for three weeks, taking a four of five tabs spaced over a week. Having recently
acquired a casual job at Flemington Markets, twenty minutes from the centre of
Sydney, five nights a week that paid cash in hand, as well as receiving unemployment
welfare, and sharing a rent controlled apartment with a friend, it was no
problem financing the extra outlay for the trips. He was also easily able to
get it thanks to a friend’s housemate, and it was an absolutely fantastic three
weeks on the renewed acid. When it came time to attend his job at night the
trip had largely worn off, enough so that he could attend to his duties well
enough. But the acid had unintended consequences. Instead of regaining the voices,
he had, three weeks after the treatment began, become always followed by three
small faeries. He could almost always feel, at an icy centre between his shoulder
blades, when the faeries were following him, sometimes turning around to watch
them, hovering in mid-air, regarding him with much apparent concentration. The
faeries were dressed as they are usually portrayed, except each little lady had
a diaphanous crown, and each had purple shoes, flats.

The faeries, though, soon stopped watching
him mutely and attentively, and instead (but without speaking, and appearing
clearly in his mind’s eye, instead of following him, out in the ‘real world’)
urged him to commit suicide. The voices weren’t coming back so he may as well give
up the search, and then instantly end a life that would be meaningless without
them. In fact, the only way he could be happy, the faeries implied, was if he
suicided. He was going to die anyway, right? No-one really wanted him either, they
also somehow made him feel. They told him all this in pantomime and liked to
dumb show various ways of ending one’s life. One of the little vixens could
even manage to turn a faint purple in the face while clearly being barbarously
hanged. Another one showed him how to properly cut his wrists, by cutting up
vertically. She always mimed laughter while she pretended to open her veins
with a knife. And then suddenly ceasing mirth and wiping the imagined bloodied
arm until it was clean again. Ready for more suicide.

By a few days of this gruesomeness, he had
had enough. He had no intention of committing suicide, and became very worried
when he briefly mused over giving in to the faeries. Just end his life and the
horrors filling his days and nights, for whatever reasons the wee ladies had. He
called in sick to work and rang for an ambulance, pleading psychosis, and
flushed the three remaining acid tabs down the toilet while he waited to be
rescued. The faeries had been scared off, thankfully.

The ambulance arrived quickly and the
paramedics were rapidly able to see that Toby, when he explained his situation,
was in the grip of psychosis. They took him to the nearest psychiatric
hospital, Rozella, but they had no room for him there. They tried a few others
and he was eventually able to be taken in at Cumberland Hospital, a half hour’s
drive west from Surrey Hills, in Westmead. Even then Toby had to wait two hours
before he could be formally admitted. The faeries appeared to him constantly
while he waited, in probably all possible attitudes of self-destruction.
Closing his eyes didn’t help, he just saw the same violent images in negative.
It really is a wonder that Toby was not by now weeping from sheer despair.

Toby had been in a psychiatric facility
only once in his life, about two years before. He had been taken there against
his will when a police officer saw him sitting in the lotus position in the
middle of a footpath in Surrey Hills, apparently meditating. When she asked him
what he was doing there he couldn’t very well say he was so very high on some
really good acid and was thus now engaged in giving thanks to the Supreme
Beings whom were showing him such utter ecstasy. Instead he replied,

‘Being a calm beacon of hope to everyone
rushin’ around here. Chillin’ by example, givin’ other choices.’

‘Do you have any drugs on you?’ asked the
officer.

‘No.’

‘You know some people would say it’s very
strange to be meditating in the middle of the street, especially in this heat.’

‘Nature is as nature does.’

‘Have you ever been to a psychiatric
hospital?’

‘No way, man, I’m way too chill for that.’

‘Well, it seems to me, sir, that you’ll
have to go there with me now.’

Toby hung his head, still in the lotus
position, and asked,

‘Do I have a choice?’

‘I’m
afraid not, sir.’

He was only six nights in the psychiatric
hospital that time, in the Missenden Unit, the psychiatric wing of Royal Prince
Alfred Hospital, in Camperdown, the nearest psychiatric hospital to Surrey
Hills. The hospital didn’t do much, except to increase his Fluanxol to 30mg. He
was surprised to find that the loony bin wasn’t at all loony, the patients all
appearing more or less stable. True, they all had their idiosyncrasies, but the
place was generally pleasant and welcoming. In fact, a very ‘chillin’’ place.
Thus, he was expecting Cumberland Hospital to be similarly pleasant and
welcoming when he eventually arrived there in the ambulance.

The hospital was indeed pleasant, and when
they found out upon his admission that Toby was on an antipsychotic, and a CTO,
but still having hallucinations, they automatically increased the dose of his injection,
to 40mg, and generally left him alone after that, letting the new dose take
effect. After all, the Fluanxol was very effective at controlling such symptoms
and a higher dose was certain to solve the conundrum. So, Cumberland kept him
only for five weeks and prescribed him Risperdal as well. Toby was always
compliant with his medication (since he really had no choice, the medicine
being useless anyway), and he was also compliant with taking the new Risperdal,
always one of the first to line up when then medicines cart came out of an
evening. He was prescribed five milligrams per night, but was initially still
taunted by the faerie hallucinations. Their jeering, mocking faces though began
to lose outline after a week, and after a further week they had completely
vanished. He awoke soon after the start of this second week, feeling something
was not right while he had his morning coffee. Taking the last sip of the brew,
he knew what it was: he could no longer see those murderous vixens with his
mind’s eye. He was discharged from Cumberland three weeks later, still free of
the horrors. He had, though, lost his job.

He was at peace now, only vaguely hoping
his happy voices would still return, a calmness and serenity that lasted all
too inconsequentially. His voices did eventually return, one week into only
intermittently using the Risperdal at home (it made him very, very drowsy. He
was aware that he really should be more compliant but felt sure he could safely
risk the irregular use of the Risperdal, since he was also on the Fluanxol.),
but they were not happy to be with him again. They were now hostile to him,
making derogatory comments on his person, his clothes, his hygiene, anything to
make him feel small and worthless. He initially tried to argue with the voices,
to show them that they were patently wrong, were in fact being needlessly
spiteful. But the voices didn’t listen, calling him a coward for not seeing how
vile he really was.

Unlike the positive voices, these nasty
ones were not with him all day. They were with him when he awoke late each
morning and gradually insulted him in decreasing waves until they disappeared in
the early evening. This lack of constancy was even worse as Toby spent the
entire night dreading the abuse he was to face the next day. He felt that at
least if they were going all the time he could put them to the back of his head,
becoming just background static. But their brief appearance tended to highlight
their vile abuse, made him feel it the more in contrasting it against the calmness
of his evenings.

It
was in feeling like this - that his life was now to be an endless round of
abuse - that he slashed his left wrist. He slashed up vertically, not
horizontally, as the faerie had shown him, but his primal, animal brain
couldn’t bring him to slash all the way up. After a two inch gash, he stopped.
And almost viscerally felt the voices laughing at his weakness, shaming him as
a hopeless coward.

So, whilst bandaging his wrist as best he
could, the voices became louder, as if they fed on his blood, and their
derision was even more caustic. They filled his head and Toby could see no
escape, not even death. Was he, he thought, tying off the clean dishcloth he
used as a bandage, really in a living Hell?

He took a Risperdal and went to the local
doctors’ for some stitches. He would tell the doctor that it was an accident, a
knife that had got away in cutting up some vegetables. The voices laughed at
him all the way there.

*

He noticed immediately
when he awoke, two weeks after slashing up, that the voices weren’t berating him.
He knew instantly because he had been dreaming of them the entire previous
night. With sure dream like ability he had tamed them. How he had managed this
he did not know. He suspected it was taking the Risperdal regularly, and its
mixing with the Fluanxol, a potent combination that was bound to end the
torture, given time. His local doctor agreed with him when he mentioned it at
his next Fluanxol injection appointment, the day following having awoken to
silence.

But his mornings still made him nervous
for a while, expecting the worst to suddenly explode in his head. He was all
the time on the lookout for them, even being somewhat jumpy when he was out and
about. He had also by this stage given up all desire to regain the friends he
used to have in his head, and was more than pleased to have them gone. Nothing,
nothing at all, was worth having to put up with that depressing, internal,
inescapable tirade that his search for those friendly voices had led to, albeit
indirectly. No, he had lost the good voices permanently and they could only be
recalled in a bloodied guise, intent now only on debasing him.

The night of his first full day freed from
the internal abuse he had another powerful dream, dreaming he was filled with
great magicks and shaping great, vague, moments of history. Such dreams then
continued every night, to the point where he now often goes to bed early, just
to return to a Universe where he is so very important. He continues to awake late
each morning with neither hallucinatory voices nor hallucinatory visions, and
instead feeling great, motivated, that the world has a special place for him alone.
He remains to this day enclosed by his dreamtime powers, even when he is
working at his new cash-in-hand casual job, as a kitchen hand, and is determined
to take his boon medications properly, and on time. He owed Reality that much.

~~~

If you have been enjoying Fitzpatrick's stories here you may also enjoy his short story collections, and other books, available online as both Kindle books and paperbacks (go to http://amzn.to/1NfodtN). Other ebook and paperback options are available at http://bit.ly/1UsyvKD Fitzpatrick has also had a collection of short stories, Aberrant Selected, published by Waldorf Publishing, available on Amazon.